Mario Moreno put his hand into the air and flagged down the patrol car. For weeks a mangled Honda coupe, its back end crushed and its seats torn out, sat abandoned in the street across from his Wilmington house.

Blue chalk lines in the street illustrated how many times parking officers had marked the wrecked car for towing, and how many times its owner moved it a few inches forward or backward to avoid it.

“They gonna pick that (expletive) up?” the father of five daughters asked Sgt. Scott Engedal.

For too long, Moreno said, crime, trash, prostitutes, drug dealing and gangs have dominated his neighborhood – an area of northeast Wilmington commonly known as Ghost Town.

Residents like Moreno raise their children amid the rampant crime, blight and gang members that surround them.

“We got kids, man,” Moreno said. “(Expletive) selling dope like selling cookies! I try to keep my house clean. We are paying a lot of money in taxes.”

Gunfire at night – or even during the day – is common.

“You see people – `Pow, pow, pow!”‘ Moreno said.

Ghost Town is unlike any other neighborhood in the South Bay. Police and prosecutors say the drug dealing is controlled by nine families with connections to a single gang, which operated the business – at least until recently – almost unimpeded.

“If you are going to Ghost Town, it’s because you have a purpose: Either you are going to buy drugs or you are going to visit someone you know there,” said Los Angeles police Cmdr. Patrick Gannon, who formerly headed the Harbor Division.

“It was just its own community. If you lived in that part of Wilmington, nobody said you lived in Wilmington. You lived in Ghost Town.”

The origin of its nickname isn’t clear. Most people believe it’s simply because Wilmington Cemetery sits to the west.

Most of the homes in Ghost Town are protected by chain-link or wrought-iron fences. Some streets were repaved recently, but curbs are broken, weeds are growing through the sidewalks and gang tags mark the park’s jungle gym.

Populated by about 1,200 primarily Latino and black residents, Ghost Town is bordered by Pacific Coast Highway on the south, Sanford Avenue on the west and East Sandison Street on the north. The eastern border, Drumm Avenue, ends at a brick wall.

Barbed wire surrounds the north, west and east sides of the neighborhood. The sharp points are not to keep anyone out of the Wilmington enclave, but keep the residents from getting into any of the businesses that surround it.

For three decades, police and prosecutors say, the East Side Pain gang has operated the drug trade. Buyers come from all over Southern California, looking to pick up rock cocaine and marijuana.

According to interviews and affidavits filed in federal and state courts, Ghost Town is an easy place to deal drugs. It’s unique geography makes it difficult for police to patrol. There are only four north and south streets, with no entry from the north side.

The streets are long and narrow, making it hard for officers to conduct surveillance and go undetected.

The geography allows gang members to keep close watch on everyone entering and exiting the neighborhood. Gannon said gang members make “amazing use” of Nextel phones and other communication devices to alert drug dealers that police have arrived.

“Everybody kind of keeps an eye out,” Gannon said. “They call it chirping and they chirp each other to let them know the police are in the area.”

Prosecutors say the ESP gang has 84 documented members. Most live in the neighborhood and are related by blood or marriage.

The gang’s main function is selling drugs, but its members are responsible for homicides, assaults, criminal threats, intimidation and vandalism, court affidavits say. Its members carry guns and affiliate themselves with other Blood street gangs in Los Angeles, Compton and Long Beach.

“They had their share of shootings over there, not as many as other parts of Wilmington, but I’m aware of – in the 2<MD+,%30,%55,%70>1/<MD-,%0,%55,%70>2 years I was there – two officer-involved shootings that I responded to,” Gannon said.

Established in the 1970s, ESP originally was a faction of the Eastside Wilmas gang. But now they’re rivals. Most of ESP’s members are black.

After the Normont Terrace housing project in Harbor City was razed about seven years ago, ESP absorbed the project’s Blood gang, the Waterfront Pirus, federal documents said.

Nine families call the shots, controlling eight to 10 homes in Ghost Town. At least one member of each family is an active ESP member, court records show.

“Their way of life appears to have been passed down from generations, parents to children or younger gang members,” court documents said. “It is common for narcotic sellers in this neighborhood to deal drugs in the presence of very young children, especially their own.”

ESP does not allow nonmembers or anyone not associated with ESP to sell narcotics in Ghost Town without paying some of their profits to the gang. ESP refers to them as “taxes,” prosecutors said.

The drug dealers only will do business with people they know. Undercover police officers trying to make drug buys must recruit and work with a “hook,” someone previously known to the seller. The hook acts as a middleman between the officer and the dealer.

Police say they have done their best to battle the drug dealing. As captain, Gannon said he participated in 20 to 25 search warrants in the area.

“It definitely was a challenge for us to police,” Gannon said. “We worked that thing virtually every day. It has been a problem for a long time.”

From January 2005 to May 2007, police made 312 drug-related arrests. But officials say they could not control the drug trade because new gang members immediately filled the void.

“We hit it from a more traditional narcotics angle where you go after the sellers and try to find out where they are hiding their stash,” Gannon said. “We would never make any inroads into the hierarchy of that particular gang. That was very difficult.”

This year, however, in a plan spearheaded by former Harbor Division Cmdr. Joan McNamara, Los Angeles police officers attacked the drug dealers differently.

Federal, state and local narcotics officers teamed with LAPD officers, gathering intelligence on the gang’s leadership and everyone involved from the bottom to the top.

“Instead of doing traditional police work where you go in and you don’t have the full story, we spent a long time gathering the intelligence,” said McNamara, who recently was promoted.

On July 31, about 500 Los Angeles police officers and federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives agents swarmed into the community, arresting 43 suspected gang members and drug dealers.

“We want to make a difference quickly,” McNamara said. “I think what we’ve done in the past is effective. It’s not effective long-term.”

In addition to the arrests, federal prosecutors filed lawsuits designed to take over drug dealers’ homes under federal asset-forfeiture laws.

The City Attorney’s Office additionally filed suit against four Ghost Town homeowners, charging that they failed to keep their lots free of crime. The actions could result in fines, orders to clean up the properties or potential seizure of the properties.

“The way we did this, this simultaneous serving of the search warrants, the simultaneous arrests, the simultaneous taking of the homes, the simultaneous prosecuting them to the best of our abilities, really went to the heart of them,” McNamara said.

One defendant is Portia Hodge, who denies involvement in the drug dealing and said she does not live in Ghost Town. The city attorney’s lawsuit against her, however, says Hodge’s nephew made repeated drug sales from a property she owns.

Doniel Fox, whose brother Henry Hood was among those arrested, complained that the police action was unnecessary.

“I think it’s bogus,” Fox said. “They came out really hard for no reason. I don’t believe what they did was right. Wilmington is a family.”

Fox complained that the police “really only picked black people” and found just $14,000 cash when they believed they were going to “get millions and millions.”

“They made it seem like Wilmington was the biggest drug cartel in the world and it’s really not,” she said.

The City Attorney’s Office says it also is attempting to improve other neighborhood conditions.

Deputy City Attorneys Kevin Gilligan and Rubin Harsoyo spent time recently examining streets and parks, taking photographs of work that needs to be done.

Trees need trimming, weeds need removing, sidewalks need repairs.

Some work is under way. Much of the graffiti has been covered, including a huge “Welcome to Ghost Town” mural that filled a long wall on O Street.

“It took 30 years to get this way; it’s not going to be fixed in five minutes,” Gilligan said.

Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who represents the area, will hold a community meeting to discuss issues in east Wilmington on Oct. 2 at Holy Family Church.

Hahn said she has focused on the Ghost Town community for some time.

“We have resurfaced almost every street in this area,” she said. “We have repainted and restriped the curbs and streets. Within the next two months we will have trimmed every tree in this neighborhood and we have increased the pickup of dumping and the removal of graffiti.”

Police are now working to elicit community help and establish leaders.

Officers have patrolled on horseback and are working to gain the support of residents.

“You have a community that’s literally been besieged by illegal activity for decades,” McNamara said.

“I can understand why the trust was waning.”

McNamara said the police action has improved conditions, but residents must now take the lead.

“This is a really important time to let them understand, let them know it’s a different place,” McNamara said. “We are not done by any stretch. It began with taking the cancer out. ? Now it’s the time for the community to work together.”